There are not a lot of rebels in America. Most Americans don’t seem to realise this – they still think they’re living in the home of the free – but the truth is that the decisions of their daily life have become so commercialised, their self-image so puffed up with patriotism, their politics so encased in self-righteousness that this society, which is so keen to boast about its devotion to the individual, has become a cathedral to conformity. Nevertheless, a few survive.
Houston is a metaphor for all this. At first sight, it is the whole American nightmare embodied in concrete – 50 miles wide, littered with ghettos, ravaged by freeways, awash with drugs and crime and corruption – and yet, down on the ground, in the shadow of the arrogant skyscrapers with their hostile reflecting walls, there is yet life, creative, rebellious, human life. Which is where the Art Cars come in.
At first sight, an Art Car is nothing but weird. It’s an 1985 Dodge van that has mutated into a 13ft shark’s fin or a station wagon disguised as a fruit bowl or any other vehicle on which its owner’s imagination has run riot, producing, for example, an ocean-going liner, or a motorised living room, or a cigar, or a cow, or simply an explosion of unbridled ornamentation.
But the closer you get, the more you see, and so Art Cars turn out to be a kind of rebellion on wheels in which anyone can take hold of the most potent available symbol of corporate America and shape it to their own particular will. The parade of Art Cars from all over the US, which has become an annual event in Houston over the past 12 years, is a rebel reunion.
Sometimes, the rebellion is spectacular, like the 1974 Ford pick-up that joined the parade a few years ago as a model of the Waco siege, when 75 men, women and children were burned to death as the FBI stormed David Koresh’s commune. Under the banner ‘God, guns and government’, the Waco car made its mark as the parade reached its destination in downtown Houston, by exploding in flames. Sometimes, it is more subtle, like the car that took 110 gallons of water from the River Ganges and sprayed it gently over by-standers in a city that suffers from drive-by shootings, this was a drive-by blessing.
This year, more than 200 vehicles cruised slowly past the skyscrapers to gather at a multistorey car park where that night they staged the Art Car Ball, an annual extravaganza of music and fancy dress. Everywhere, there was mobile evidence of the conventional transformed into the individual: an old school bus that had become a traveling shrine to Our Lady of What We Have In Common; an extraterrestrial ambulance from Nebraska; a dalmation dog; a zebra; a draughtboard; a protest against sanctions imposed on Iraq; a Viking long boat; a transparent house in which the Future Family lived in filth; a ladybird; a mobile warning of nuclear attack; and an intricately-adorned Cadillac called Sheikh Yer Gruve Thang.
‘All art cars are subversive,’ according to Jim Harithas, who runs the Art Car Museum in Houston. ‘They have in common the transformation of the vehicle from a factory-made commodity into a personal statement or expression. On one level, art cars can be seen as a popular movement engaged in rescuing the automobile from corporate uniformity. In so doing, art cars are reviving the sense of individuality which is in decline in our society.’
Some of the subversion is explicit. A group of art students from Dallas had registered a protest against a current series of vodka commercials by reconstructing the death of New York artist Jackson Pollock, complete with a vodka bottle and a tree embedded into the smashed bonnet of their vehicle. They called it Absolut Pollock. But the whole art form is implicitly subversive of middle-class, elitist art, since it uses everyday material and draws on the skills of ordinary people who work on their cars in their backyards. Latino migrants, in particular, have been customising their cars for decades, and the Hispanic gangs from north Houston turned out for the parade in their Low Riders: the cars have had their suspension slashed so that they hover low over the road, and then break into a crazy dance as each hydraulically-controlled wheel starts to heave and push in its own direction.
The parade displayed its roots in the 1960s, with hippy VW vans carrying pictures of the Beatles and slogans of love and peace a yellow submarine and the aluminium trailer of Slim Sirnes, who dropped out more than 30 years ago and never came back and who now, aged 69, spends his time in the solitude of Goldfield, Nevada, laboriously cutting thousands of beer cans into quarter-inch strips of aluminium and then plaiting the strips into chairs, blankets, handbags and model animals.
Some of the cars play on words, like the Carmadillo, 40ft of welded metal plate clamped on to a VW, all shaped like an armadillo or the Mobile Phone, a public telephone made mobile by welding it to a metal platform on wheels with a scooter engine at its rear. Others play with reality, like Larry Fuente’s gigantic fluffy pink Rex Rabbit, in the Art Car Museum, which rapes the Volkswagen Beetle beneath it, occasionally expressing its excitement by flapping its hydraulically-operated ears. It was Fuente who made the famous motor- bike cow which he baptised Cowasaki. This year, he missed the parade friends said he had just about killed himself when his latest creation, a prototype mobile horse, bolted with him during a test run.
And yet every rebellion has its reactionaries. The same commercial forces that were targeted by the cars have crept up behind them. This year, for the first time in its 12 years, the parade was sponsored, by a Houston company that manufactures engine oil. Its car led the parade, covered in promotional flags, which also fluttered along the route. Its chief executive turned out in a dinner jacket to waggle his buttocks to the music at the previously unorthodox Art Car Ball. Some of the car artists had an answer. They set up an Art Resistance League, held their own ball in a darker and dirtier car park and they say that next year they may hold a break-away parade.
The Practicals
Four dates of the ART Car Parade next spring, call 001 713 861 5526. American Airlines (0870 60505006) organises fly-drives to Houston for pounds 659 (travelling in July). British Airways Holidays (0870 2424243) has seven night fly-drives for pounds 519pp. Different price bands apply after June 30. For flights only, try Continental (0800 776464) or British Airways (0345 222111). Both fly direct to Houston with fares from pounds 325/ pounds 335 plus tax until July 23.
